Creature record / 1996
November 1996. Something washed onto Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. No surviving source records the day, the beach or what it looked like. What survives is a sample. Staff from the Nantucket Shellfish Warden's office collected it, froze it and sent it to Sidney K. Pierce's laboratory in Tampa. In 2004 Pierce and his colleagues set it beside the remains of other famous sea monsters. Under the microscope they found layers of collagen and no cells at all. Then the Nantucket Blob did what the other old samples could not. It yielded DNA. The answer came back clear. Not a monster. A fin whale.
A globster is an unidentified organic mass that washes ashore. Shapeless and sometimes enormous, these masses have been claimed as sea monsters for more than a century, especially in the nonscientific literature. Without a skeleton they are hard to identify, especially, as one scientific paper put it, "by untrained observers."